The Defence Headquarters (DHQ), Abuja, has accused Reuters, a British international news agency, of attempt to blackmail the Nigerian military through what it described as “mercenary journalism”.
The Director, Defence Information, Maj.-Gen. Jimmy Akpor, disclosed this in a statement on Saturday in Abuja.
Akpor said the news outlet wrote that it was working on a series of stories about purported actions of the Nigerian military during the government’s 13-year war against insurgents in Nigeria’s North-East.
He said that Reuters had indicated to work on supposed stories that were purported to focus on supposed military-run programme of forced abortions performed on women and girls who were held captive and impregnated by terrorists.
The second, according to him, is a supposed killing of children by the military as part of counterinsurgency operations.
Reacting to these allegations, the two-star general said that Nigerians, and by extension Nigerian military, were not made in such wicked mold, adding that the Reuters team could not appropriate the evil of infanticide to the Nigerian military and the Nigerian peoples.